Buffett to busted NCAA bracketeers: Next year I’ll make it easer to win

Warren Buffett says he would have been happy to dole out that $1 billion prize to the person who filled out a perfect bracket this year. If, of course, all those upsets hadn’t crushed pretty much everyone’s retire-like-Buffett dreams. Thank you, Kansas, Duke, Ohio State.

“We’ve paid out big on insurance policies in the past — we paid out $3 billion on Katrina, so that’s just part of the insurance business. It would not have bothered me to pay out the billion,” the Sage of Omaha told CBS Sports’ Mike Singer in an interview Monday evening.

Buffett said he just wished the run of perfect brackets could have gone on even longer, “not all the way, but quite a bit longer.” The 20 top-scoring brackets still get $100,000 each. Provided Quicken Loans is up to doing it all again, he says he’s game as well, though with some changes.

“I would hope we could get an arrangement that made it somewhat easier to enter and somewhat easier to win…There were some questions that were a little tough, I thought. We’ll make it easier to win, but I think we’ll have an exciting prize.”

Among the myriad of questions, many of which concerned money and sports, Buffett says he’s not uncomfortable talking about how much he’s worth, but still only surrendered that the tally “moves around a lot, but it does not change my life. I’ll have hamburgers and a Coke for the lunch no matter what happens.”

He was also asked to name the most extravagant thing he ever bought.

“If you won’t tell anybody. I bought a fractional interest in a plane sometime ago. I originally called it the Indefensible, but now it’s the Indispensable. I’m going to be buried with that plane, just like Roy Rogers and Trigger.”

Buffett clearly charmed the pants off CBS’s Singer, who described him as the “coolest and most genuinely likeable multi-billionare you’ll ever listen to.”

Well, some would add “crusher of dreams” to that description.

But maybe we all just have to shake it off like Buffett? Has he ever lost a billion in a day?

“Definitely, but it doesn’t really make a difference. I eat the same… It’s part of the game,” says Buffett.

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